During a short break in the snowfall, I walked up from the house a little way to take some pictures. (I think the official snow total so far is under a foot, but out there walking on uneven ground, it was more like a foot and a half in places.) I was heading out because a hole had opened up in the clouds to the south, and I thought there might be something cool to see. There was!
Painting with a wand of light
Do you know the kind of clouds that hug the mountain slopes after a thunderstorm or snow, the whispy, cobwebby things? [See above, obviously.] I’m sure they have a name. They look like pulled-apart cotton candy. Anyway, I stood there watching them drift across Miranda Canyon, just over the hill, when all of a sudden I saw a couple of them jolt into life, pirouetting and expanding rapidly. What turned them into dervishes? It was the sunlight: as soon as they wafted into the path of the beam, the heat of the sun set them spinning, and then they rose up into the sky, evaporating as they climbed. In the image, you can see one largish foreground cloud augering upward, and there are a couple of much smaller ones spinning and disappearing to the right. All of those are moving higher very quickly at the same time.
I couldn’t get over it. As the photo caption says, it was like the sun painting with a wand of light, making the clouds dance. Ah, but there was even more:
Colossal spiraling column of air
I gradually became aware that the low clouds nearest me were moving one way, and the low clouds farthest away another. In the absence of a stronger overwhelming wind, the entire column of sun-warmed air, maybe a mile wide, was slowly spiraling upward as well! You could tell if you gently unfocused your eyes and took in the whole scene at once.
Spirals within a spiral within another and another, the weather system, the rotation of the earth, the orbits of the planets, the arc of the moving solar system, the spiral of the Milky Way, and the water going down my drain…
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